Gov’t to change duration of SHS to 4 years

The Nana Akufo-Addo led government is considering a possible change in the duration of the Senior High School (SHS) from three years to four years.

The Minister of Planning, Professor Gyan Baffour, has said the government is currently assessing the effectiveness of the current three-year duration and will soon make a firm decision.

“The time lost, we have to make it up. That is the first thing that we are trying to do now, and based on that, we can now use the analysis that they do after that time, to see what the public thinks and to decide on whether we move for three years or four years,” news portal, Class FM online, quoted the Minister as saying on Wednesday.

Professor Baffour made the comments at the launch of the Ghana Social Development Outlook 2016 at the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER).

The duration of the secondary level education has always been tossed between three and four years depending on which political party was in power.

The New Patriotic Party (NPP) administration under former President John Agyekum Kufuor, changed it from three to four years – kick-starting a chain reaction whose end is not in sight.

The NDC under the late President John Evans Atta Mills did not fail expectations and reversed the duration to three years.

The NDC government that took over the helm of affairs after Professor Mills, the John Mahama-led administration, maintained the duration at three years.

However, as another NPP government led by Nana Akufo-Addo wields power, the duration is set to change to four years once again.

“If it is found out the four years is better than three years in training our children, then money should not be the basis [for] denying them that four years… It is not only access, but it also includes quality, and if it is four years that will give them quality and that is what the people want, so be it,” the Minister of Planning has said.

ABOUT: Nana Kwesi Coomson

An Entrepreneur and Philanthropist. Editor-in-Chief of www.233times.com. A Senior Journalist with Ghanaian Chronicle Newspaper. An alumnus of Adisadel College where he read General Arts. He holds first degree in Bachelor of Arts from the University of Ghana; Political Science (major) and History (minor). He has also pursued MSc Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Energy with Public Relations (PR) at the Robert Gordon University in the United Kingdom. He is a 2018 Mandela Washington Fellow (YALI) who studied at Clark Atlanta University on the Business and Entrepreneurship track. His mentors are Rupert Murdoch, Warren Buffet, Sam Jonah, Kwaku Sakyi Addo and Piers Morgan